re: Anybody here been to Dark Lord Day?Posted by tetu on 8/20/13 at 9:58 am to LSUGrad00

quote:I agree, but I much prefer the reserve society model where I don't have to wait in line for the beer

I do like the reserve society as well. I have a El Catador Club membership. It's early but works well so far. We can reserve extra bottles online. Reserving a 110K+OT today. (imperial stout brewed with raspberries and aged in port barrels)

quote:Yep... I'll have to dig up the video, its on one of the beer sites. A guy does a pretty long rant about the allocation and claims he waited 3-4 hours before ultimately walking away.

Man if they still have this issue all I can do is

The first time I went it was basically just show up and wait in line. Everyone was furious, especially ones that didn't get beer in the end.

The second year we went, we learned and brought tailgate chairs and some beers to drink while we waited. It took longer, but they let people purchase "golden tickets" ahead of time. each person got a 3 bottle allotment per ticket, and two tickets per person I think. So even though we were in line, we knew we would get what we came for.

Now from what I had heard they were trying to alleviate the standing in line by giving different tickets, different pick up times as to avoid to waiting. however I think most of the issue comes from people waiting to get into the brew pub to get the special brews etc. It's also run by a bunch of total morons. Seriously, I'll have to show you pics of the folks "running things" aka "the minions" as they called themselves. It was laughable.

re: Anybody here been to Dark Lord Day?Posted by LSUGrad00 on 8/20/13 at 10:09 am to tetu

quote:I have a El Catador Club membership. It's early but works well so far. We can reserve extra bottles online. Reserving a 110K+OT today. (imperial stout brewed with raspberries and aged in port barrels)

Nice! I didn't know if CCB was going to allow members to reserve extra bottles so I passed.

The Bruery has been really good about giving members multiple chances to buy limited release beers if there are extras. Hopefully CCB will do the same thing for you El Catador Club members.

re: Anybody here been to Dark Lord Day?Posted by Tommy Patel on 8/20/13 at 3:11 pm to beaver

never been to Dark Lord Day, been to the Beer festival in Portland Oregon its held every July, home brews that were well crafted. Food vending sucked, a couple south louisiana tailgaters could haul their gear up there and blow their minds with some tailgate cuisine that always goes well with beer and make some $, they're always looking for food vendors.

re: Anybody here been to Dark Lord Day?Posted by lsuchap on 8/20/13 at 5:19 pm to beaver

I have never been to Dark Lord Day, but I visited the brewpub last year while in Chicago. Honestly,I think I had a better experience in that I could sit at the bar and taste everything they had available without the crowd. Sure there is some novelty in attending Dark Lord Day, but it was pretty awesome enjoying Arctic Panzer Wolf and Dreadnaught on tap.

- (first year) stand in line for 5 hours to purchase tickets, in order to stand in another line for 2 or 3 hours to purchase the beer. There were more people than beer (and some people were jumping back in and buying more bottles), so some people stood in line for 6+ hours and walked away with nothing. Even though they knew they were running out of Dark Lord, none of the "minions" thought it would be a good idea to let the people towards the back of the line know that they were standing around for nothing.

- (second year) stand in line for 6 hours to purchase beer that you already had to have a ticket to purchase. (The problem: you could buy more beer than just Dark Lord, but everything was purchased at the same tables. So instead of just turning over X number of tickets and Y dollars and receiving Z bottles, you're dealing with a ton of people who have been drinking for 6 hours and standing around in the sun trying to figure out what they want and figure out how much cash they needed. Which was a problem because:)

- all purchases are made inside of an echoing metal warehouse which is also hosting death metal bands blasting at 11 throughout the event, making it so that no one can hear anyone else half of the time.

- the tables for both merch and beer are inside of this metal warehouse, so people stumbling over to the merch tables are slowing down people shambling into the beer tables. At least they had separate tables, I guess. (Also, god help you if the poor bastard in front of you doesn't have enough cash, because:)

- it's a cash-only event set in a business park in a dump of a town, where the only ATM anywhere near the premises is out of cash. Awesome foresight for an event with thousands of people.

- to get to the brewpub, you had to cross through the line into the warehouses. The line for the brewpub was so long that it interfered with the line for the warehouses, and two lines of drunk people with nothing to look at for multiple hours but a business park in Indiana does not make for such a great event. There were also some benches and tables set up on the property between the two lines for tasting and trading and whatnot, but good luck actually getting to them.

- the area with food was adjacent to the port-o-lets, and the lines for both got in the way of each other. They didn't clash with the lines for the warehouses and the brewpub, at least. (The food was also kind of shite even for an outdoor festival, but I gave them a pass for it because a) it was Indiana and b) it wasn't as screwed up as everything else they were trying to do.)

I heard that the event got somewhat better, but I'm not going back to find out. I think I figured out about 30 easy ways to make the thing run smoother during one hour of standing in that line.

Also, and this is not a popular opinion, but I don't even think that Dark Lord is as good as some other normally-commercially-available stouts. The barrel-aged vanilla Dark Lord we tried from the brewpub during the second year was pretty good, but it wasn't worth the mess of the rest of the event. I think there are some people who like the fact that they can trade it for other hard-to-get items or sell it for cash more than for the beer itself.